In A World Without Electricity

(a true story)

The note was taped to our front door: "I am sorry to have to tell you, but your sister Katie was murdered by Nick. Please call me. Laverne. 555 - 6072." That's how we found out.

She was thrown off her fifth floor balcony and fell onto the patio of an empty apartment on the ground floor. Her body was not found until the next day, when the landlord was showing the apartment to a young Pakistani couple.

They didn't rent the apartment.

At first, the detectives who were on the job claimed she was a suicide, but all of us who knew her said it couldn't have been. No chance. No way. Not with that note. And what we saw in the apartment...

On her dresser, there were letters that were addressed, stamped, and ready to be mailed. Thank you notes to teachers and students of elementary school classes she had recently visited as part of her internship to be a teacher....

There were dates in her calendar months ahead. Events she would not have wanted to miss...

Her cousin's wedding in Pittsburgh.

And the First Presbyterian Church social. She sang in the band.

And a trip to the beach with her sister Mary. She went nuts for the water.

Her apartment was tiny, with one bedroom, a cramped kitchen, and a bathroom. Her joke was that if it was in New York City, it'd be a palace. But it wouldn't be a palace there, or anywhere...

With no job, and on welfare, she had trouble paying her bills. She would come by our house once a week for some teabags or a stick of butter. Nothing extravagent, just enough for a cup of tea, some buttered toast, and a quiet afternoon with a book.

She loved to read: anything by Georgette Hyer, Joanna Trollope, Frances Burnett, or Daisy Goodwin. But really, anything would do. She had a joke about it...

The detectives never interviewed her boyfriend. He had checked into a mental ward the morning of the murder, so he had an alibi.

But what if she didn't die right away? we asked the detectives. What if she lay in the downstairs patio for hours before finally succumbing to her injuries? What if Nick pushed her off and then checked into the ward to create an alibi?

We don't know about that, the detectives said. Did she have any enemies? Anyone who might want to harm her? Other than her boyfriend?

No one except herself, we said. She spent most of her life hurting herself with alcohol and drugs. She'd stopped doing that, though, after having major surgery on her heart...

She had a heart valve replacement using the artery of a pig. It was a chancy operation, but it kept her alive. She was sober and back in school. She was happy to be a student again.

"I'm part pig now," she would joke when we saw her. "But don't take it to heart."

Anyway, we hadn't given up on the case. If you looked at the telephone records, her last incoming call from Nick was at 1:43 AM on the morning of the murder. This was ten hours before her body was discovered, and two hours before Nick checked into the ward.

That's as far as we could take it. It's been six months now, and nothing much else has happened.

We tried to call Laverne, the person who wrote the note, but she never got back to us. Three weeks after the murder, her phone was disconnected.

A month after Katie died, Nick disappeared. No one knows where he went, so he's out of the picture...

The police are still working on the case, but the trail is cold.

We still don't know for sure it was murder.

But for us, life goes on in its humdrum ways...

The young Pakastani couple who found Katie's body rented an apartment on the other side of town.

We met them once at a performance of Cats at Shea's Theater. They were sitting two seats over, and they knew who we were right away because of the news reports.